Commentary on developments in the endless dispute between evolution and creationism.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

More Transitional Forms

Thursdays are busy days for me, so I'm afraid I'll have to blog and run. Check out this article from today's New York Times:

In following the fossil tracks of human evolution, scientists have for years searched for links between Australopithecus, the kin of the famous “Lucy” skeleton, and even earlier possible ancestors. Now, they think they have found some connections in Ethiopia.

An international team of paleontologists is reporting the discovery of transitional species superimposed in sediments in the neighborhood of a single site. The findings appear today in the journal Nature.

Tim D. White, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was a team leader, and his colleagues said the 4.1-million-year-old fossils were anatomically intermediate between the earlier species Ardipithecus ramidus and the later species Australopithecus afarensis, the Lucy family. The newfound bones and teeth are the earliest remains of the most primitive Australopithecus, known as anamensis.

I love it. The ID folks boast about their fruitful scientific reasearch program, but spend most of their time desperately trying to prop up the same bad arguments they were making a decade ago. Scientists, meanwhile, seem to make significant discoveries on almost a daily basis.

23 Comments:

Human Evolution: What is it?Human evolution is not supported by the fossil evidence. Much of the alleged evidence that filled text books over the last 50 years has now been reclassified or rejected altogether. The missing links are still missing.

Human Evolution: The Legacy of the Fossil EvidenceHuman evolution has many issues, including the realities of genetics, biochemistry, design theory, irreducible complexity, DNA structure, and information systems. However, the reality of the human fossil record alone is enough to reject the theory of human evolution all together. Here are just a few of the major problems with the alleged fossil record of the past century:

Ramapithecus was widely recognized as a direct ancestor of humans. It is now established that he was merely an extinct type of orangutan.Piltdown man was hyped as the missing link in publications for over 40 years. He was a fraud based on a human skull cap and an orangutan's jaw.Nebraska man was a fraud based on a single tooth of a rare type of pig.Java man was based on sketchy evidence of a femur, skull cap and three teeth found within a wide area over a one year period. It turns out the bones were found in an area of human remains, and now the femur is considered human and the skull cap from a large ape.Neandertal man was traditionally depicted as a stooped ape-man. It is now accepted that the alleged posture was due to disease and that Neandertal is just a variation of the human kind.

Human Evolution: The Current TreeHuman evolution has its currently fashionable specimens that lead from small ape-like creatures to Homo sapiens. These are examples of the most recent alleged links:

Australopithecus afarensis, or "Lucy," has been considered a missing link for years. However, studies of the inner ear, skulls and bones have shown that she was merely a pygmy chimpanzee that walked a bit more upright than some other apes. She was not on her way to becoming human.Homo erectus has been found throughout the world. He is smaller than the average human of today, with a proportionately smaller head and brain cavity. However, the brain size is within the range of people today and studies of the middle ear have shown that he was just like current Homo sapiens. Remains are found throughout the world in the same proximity to remains of ordinary humans, suggesting coexistence. Australopithecus africanus and Peking man were presented as ape-men missing links for years, but are now both considered Homo erectus.Homo habilis is now generally considered to be comprised of pieces of various other types of creatures, such as Australopithecus and Homo erectus, and is not generally viewed as a valid classification.

Human Evolution: The Most Recent FindIn July 2002, anthropologists announced the discovery of a skull in Chad with "an unusual mixture of primitive and humanlike features." The find was dubbed "Toumai" (the name give to children in Chad born close to the dry season) and was immediately hailed as "the earliest member of the human family found so far." By October 2002, a number of scientists went on record to criticize the premature claim -- declaring that the discovery is merely the fossil of an ape.

Human Evolution: The Theory Has No Support in the Fossil RecordHuman evolution is a theory in denial. With all of this fossil evidence (or lack thereof) it becomes increasingly clear to an earnest seeker that human evolution did not happen at all. http://www.allaboutcreation.org/human-evolution.htm

social outcast:Dispite your "ability" to "ape" the creationist party line by cutting/pasteing their drowl it's hard to believe that you are not an idiot. These "issues" that you bring up have been dealt with, sucessfully, time & time again. You people are like a pitbull with a squeak-toy. Now, I don't know you so I don't know that you are, in fact, an idiot...so, I'm not calling you one. But you are making it very hard to believe otherwise. Try reading something that wasn't sanitized for your protection by the Discovery Institute.

It's OK to make mistakes. "Facts" are only facts before "truer truths" are discovered. As long as something good comes out of the theories (e.g. useful applications) then the scientists' work would not be in vain.

Thus the "theories of evolution" are themselves in constant evolution.

The irony of these argument is that even thing that are created evolve. Transportation evolved from carts to cars. And cars evolve into more aerodynamic styles. Blocks of granite evolve into sculptures. We see the creator of those things and we have no proof at all of our creator so the best explanation of our existence is evolution. But it would be closed minded of us not to consider the possibility of something guiding our evolution or planting the seeds of life. Think about that as you stretch our on your area rugs and relax.

The theory of evolution is hilarious to me and so are the twisted progressives that push it down out throats. Who am I? Just a woman without any formal education.

Even Darwin called it a theory. (A theory is a tentative insight into the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena).

I’m not really a religious woman in the formal way. Maybe I’m a Deist, like I said I lack a formal education and my feelings about God are kind of indescribable, however I talk to God every day.

Anyway, I could believe in our creator and evolution if evolution made sense to me. Despite intense research for over 150 years since the theory of evolution was made up, no one has ever shown proof in the fossil records of one animal (or species) turning into another one.

The subtitle of Darwin’s 1859 book, “The Origin of the Species,” was “The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” The book dealt with the evolution of animals in general, and his later book, “The Descent of Man,” applied his theory to humans.

How many of you believers in Darwinism knew that the widely held view was that blacks evolved from the strong but less-intelligent gorilla, Asians from the orangutan and whites from the most intelligent of all primates, the chimpanzee. Brilliant Huh?

Darwin wrote that he would rather be descended from a monkey than from a “savage.” In describing those with darker skin, he often used words like “savage,” “low,” and “degraded” to describe American Indians, pygmies, and almost every ethnic group whose physical appearance and culture differed from his own.

In the 1860s, around the time of the abolition of slavery, Darwinism made its way to American shores. It was used to justify racism against blacks, as well as the elimination of “savage native tribes” who hindered westward expansion in the name of “manifest destiny.”

The fruit of Darwin’s theories was (and is) being reaped in Australia, which was involved in a gruesome trade in “missing link” specimens fueled by early evolutionary and racist ideas. Documented evidence shows that the remains of perhaps 10,000 of Australia’s Aborigines, many murdered, were shipped to British museums in a frenzied attempt to prove the widespread belief that they were the “missing link.”

Across the globe, such conclusions led to racism, oppression, and genocide. Within decades, however, evolution would be used as justification for the whites of Europe to turn upon themselves.

Perhaps the most infamous abuse of evolution to justify racism was Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, which promoted a master race and sought to exterminate so-called inferior races.

In Asia, the Japanese justified their expansionist aggression by saying that they were the most “highly evolved” race on earth. After all, the Europeans, with their longer arms and hairy chests, were clearly closer to the ape, weren’t they? Westerners, in turn, justified their acts of mass destruction by portraying the Japanese as uncivilized savages.

Today, Darwinism and evolutionary thinking also enable ordinary, respectable professionals — otherwise dedicated to the saving of life — to justify their involvement in the slaughter of millions of unborn human beings, who (like the Aborigines of earlier Darwinian thinking) are also deemed “not yet fully human.”

I also think Evolution must be true, and the best example in front of our eyes is Natural Selection. Natural Selection has shown us several times that Evolution exists. An example could be the birds that Charles Darwin spotted and followed-up with at the Galápagos Islands. There, he noticed that all the birds shared a common ancestor, and over time, their beaks transformed to best-suit their environment. Another example that we see happening now is the evolution of Bird flu. Recently, China discovered 60-70 cases of bird flu, and were stunned. When bird flu last existed, scientists and doctors managed to dispel it and create a vaccine for it. The fact that Swine flu is back clearly suggests that evolution is true, because these viruses were able to reproduce with genetic mutations that allowed them to resist vaccines, and still effect humans.

In spite of the fact that evolutionists have expressed that there are numerous transitional structures, this is basically not genuine. What evolutionists case to be transitional structures all have completely practical parts. A genuine transitional structure would have non-working parts or members, for example, the stub of a leg or wing.